Greek Complexity

Business opportunity for mobile game developers

Mobile gaming companies in Bangalore or other parts of India who have content that they would like to expose to a large, established base of paying subscribers in emerging markets, please ping me.

Seeking telecom salesperson or channel partner

High-growth firm seeks salesperson with telecom background. Must be a self-starter with minimum ten years of experience and extensive contacts with telecom operators in Asia and/or other emerging markets. Channel partners will also be considered. Attractive upside offered including commissions and ESOP. No recruiters pls.

Seeking PR firm for long-term engagement with portfolio company. Must have strong media connections in Asia, ideally in the telecom industry or, less ideally, new media/Internet.

Update: don't need any more referrals. Thanks to all who responded.

Irony

Should this be labelled Sponsor Fail? :-)

An event that advertises the "latest in web & mobile" is sponsored by...

• Microsoft
• Nokia
• Yahoo!
• Singtel
• Amazon Web Services

What a collection! (And what a meanie I am.) AWS only just squeaks in as an honourable mention in the Funny Awards because of their recent downtime problems.

Jokes aside, I attended last year and it was actually quite a decent event though a little disorganised.

The Google Nexus S phone

To anyone who's been thinking of getting me this phone as a present, I'm not standing in your way! Even though it has a touch-screen, usually one my pet peeves. Here's why:

Click here for more.

Techcrunch on the Asian web

Just read an interesting Techcrunch post from a couple of months ago. I liked the following section best but the whole (looooong) post is worth a read for anyone interested in the state of affairs in the Asian (not just SE Asian) Internet and mobile worlds.

I liked this section best:

Current Challenges In South East Asia’s Tech Scene

It’s still very early in the game, it’s already a huge market, and there’s room for massive future growth in South East Asia’s web and mobile industry. But there are still some significant hurdles to overcome, especially if you regard South East Asia as one region.

Some hurdles I personally see in South East Asia’s web and mobile market (and on the way to a possible integration) are the:

• still relatively undeveloped tech ecosystem and its “chicken and egg” problem
  (depending on the country: big number of copycats, relatively low number of startups, few to almost no VCs firms/angel investors, low salaries for engineers, low propensity of skilled employees to work for startups, fewer people with an entrepreneurial mindset etc.)
• historically, culturally, and economically diverse markets
• much lower online spend than in North America or Europe
• weak exit environment (IPOs, trade sales)
• political and legal problems in some South East Asian countries
  (IP protection, bureaucracy for startups, general political instability)
• massive “brain drain”
• still low Internet penetration (examples: Indonesia has 12.5% Internet penetration, Vietnam has 25.7%, the Philippines just 24.5%)
• fragmented mobile landscape
• underdeveloped online and mobile payment infrastructure (if any)

Many of these problems, for example the low Internet penetration, will probably solve themselves in the future. And in fact, local startups, partly financed by local venture capital firms (which do exist), are starting to crop up all over the place.

Much better expressed and way better informed than someone else's speech that I blogged ranted about back in June.

Link: From OpenWebAsia In Kuala Lumpur: South East Asia’s Web Under The Spotlight

Do we have enough apps yet?

Social gaming's opportunities and challenges

At Echelon 2010 in Singapore yesterday and today. Vishal Gondal of Indiagames and others on the social gaming panel point out opportunities for social gaming beyond just the PC Internet and beyond Facebook specifically.

• Non-Facebook social networks around the world, such as Mixi, Renren, Cyworld, etc
• Mobile social games
• Interactive TV

Zaki Mahomed of Game Ventures thinks that payments still is a barrier to seamless roll-out and adoption of social games in Asia and on the mobile. He says there's no one simple way across games and platforms (OSs, devices, whatever) to make it easy for users to micro-transact within games. People aren't comfortable typing their credit card numbers into a mobile social game. Vishal agrees but with the qualification that in India at least premium SMS is one way to monetise.

For the Ripplevox team

[shameless plug]

Ripplevox, pick me to trial StarHub’s BlackBerry® Storm™ smartphone because:

• Who better to review this than the guy who wrote these other reviews? (Let's not reference my book reviews too.)
• I'm already a pretty heavy mobile data user and I've used several phones and other gadgets over the last few years. So I know what works and I'll tell it like it is.
• I'd LOVE to experience a better touchscreen than the iPhone's
• I'm a Starhub subscriber, of course
• I love Ripplevox! Ok, that's just flattery :)
• Can I stop now?!

[/shameless plug]

Sixth Sense

This is by far, the most innovative interface I've ever seen and am likely to see for the next few years at least. And yet, it's conceptually so simple (execution is everything) that it's really not particularly expensive, far cheaper than what it cost them to put together those simulated scenes in The Minority Report. Plus it could be extended to several several applications (yes, that's two severals) using Internet-based plumbing that already exists today.

View the video and be wowed. And I thought the bit where he walks up to his friend was just hilarious.

Video from here.